According to some studies, the volume of information over a network, such as the Internet, is expected to more than triple over the next three years. Data and content is likely to remain the largest percentage of Internet traffic, with the majority of this information being dynamic. Often, the issues of concern with Internet traffic range from business to consumer response and order times, to the time required to deliver business information to a traveler using a wireless device, to the download time for rich media such as music, videos, and so forth. Thus, not surprisingly, a major complaint among Internet users is a lack of speed. Additionally, users' complaints often center on how long it takes to display a web page, or other content, on their computing device. One solution therefore, may be to send less data. This is where compression may help.
The idea is to compress data being sent from a server, and to have a client's browser decompress this data upon receipt, thereby reducing the amount of data sent over the Internet, and increasing a web page display speed. Many, although not all, browsers are now equipped to support the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) modes that enable compression. While compression typically reduces the size of a file sent over the Internet, it may often be difficult to determine the resultant size of the compressed file until it has been compressed. Unfortunately, there are numerous applications that may need to know this resultant size a priori to the compression. One such example involves client connection ‘keep-alives,’ where multiple client requests may be sent over the same network connection. To perform such action, a client may need to know a file length to know when one response is complete and another request may be issued. Although a protocol header sent over the Internet with the file may include length information, such length information may not be correct when compression is performed on the fly. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.